On torture-4: Trying to excuse the inexcusable

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

These arguments that have been made to excuse the torture practices of the US have taken many shifting forms. In the next few posts, I list the top excuses for torture practices, followed by my responses.

Excuse 1: What was done by the US is not torture.

Excuse 2: Even if it was torture, it was justified because it worked to prevent another attack and thus saved lives.

Excuse 3: These actions did not violate any laws.

Excuse 4: Even if it did violate binding laws, it was justified because it worked to prevent another attack and thus saved lives.

Excuse 5: The people who committed torture should not be prosecuted because they were told it was legal and thus they were merely following orders.

Excuse 6: If we prosecute those who committed torture, then in future they will be “always looking over their shoulders” when conducting interrogations and hesitant to take strong actions for fear of prosecution.

Excuse 7: The people who told the torturers that it was acceptable to torture were acting in good faith and trying to protect the country, so they should not be prosecuted.

Excuse 8: If we prosecute those who authorized torture, then this would be for purely partisan reasons for retribution by Democrats against Republicans.

Excuse 9: Top Democrats were told what was going on and approved of it so that makes it ok.

Excuse 10: We need to focus on solving urgent problems like the financial and housing crisis and torture investigations will be divisive and distract us.

Excuse 11: Finally, the emotional appeal that takes various forms but one of the strongest is to invoke the extreme hypothetical: If your child was being held hostage by terrorists, wouldn’t you want any suspects to be tortured if they had information that could save your child?

Excuse 1: What was done by the US is not torture.

This argument has been put forward in two ways. One is to suggest that what was done to the detainees was mild, even routine. Sleep deprivation? Who of us haven’t had sleepless nights? Forced to stand for hours one end? Donald Rumsfeld used to wonder why the detainees were getting off so easy by being made to stand for only four hours when he often stands for 8-10 hours per day. And so on. The other is to suggest that since these torture techniques were used as part of the SERE program to train US personnel to resist torture, they cannot be torture since we wouldn’t torture our own people, would we?

Do I really need to point out why these arguments cannot be taken seriously? There is a world of difference between experiencing something voluntarily or at the hands of people you know are on your side and do not want to harm you, and having the same thing done to you by your enemies who may want to kill you. To argue otherwise is like saying that since some people voluntarily participate in S&M sexual practices, then assault or rape cannot be crimes.

Torture apologist Charles Krauthammer actually put forward the argument that the above practices could not be torture because they were used to train US troops, to which an officer in the National Guard replied:

I have friends who have been to SERE and instructed SERE students and acted as interrogators. All agree that waterboarding and other such ‘enhanced’ techniques are good for training (in a strictly controlled environment) our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines on what to expect in captivity. They also agree that it is torture to anyone outside that training environment. Finally, they all agree that torture rarely results in actionable intelligence, as the victim is willing to say most anything to end the torture.

But even beyond that, many people have been quite unequivocal about calling these practices torture. As John McCain asserted during the election campaign, the US executed Japanese soldiers in World War II for the same kinds of things that were done by the US interrogators, because they were considered torture and thus war crimes. McCain said “[F]ollowing World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding,”

Gen. Barry McCaffrey has called what was done by the US torture.

Gen Antonio Taguba, who was assigned to investigate the activities following the revelations at Abu Ghraib, has said that what was done by the Bush administrations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanmo constituted war crimes “when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture.”

Brigadier General James Cullen (Ret.), former chief judge of the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals said that giving these practices euphemisms such as “enhanced interrogation techniques” does not make it not torture. What was done was unequivocally torture. “We hear a lot of arguments to try to justify ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but we know exactly what we’re talking about. It’s torture in different packaging.”

In fact, the Senate Armed Services Committee said that the whole point of the SERE training that led to the abuses was to resist what was clearly identified as torture.

During the resistance phase of SERE training, US military personnel are exposed to physical and psychological pressures…designed to simulate conditions to which they might be subject if taken prisoner by enemies that did not abide by the Geneva Conventions. As one JPRA instructor explained, SERE training is “based on illegal exploitation (under the rules listed in the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War) of prisoners over the last 50 years.”

It is really quite simple. At the very minimum, if something is torture when done by others to you involuntarily, then it is still torture when done by you to others.

Next: More excuses

POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart talks with a torture apologist

Clifford May comes out with the usual pathetic excuses for why torture is ok if done by the US. May is the president of something called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and nothing says that you love democracy more than advocating torture practices.

The full and unedited interview is shown below in three parts.

Part 1:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 1
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Part 2

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 2
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Part 3:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
Cliff May Unedited Interview Pt. 3
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Full Episodes		 Economic Crisis First 100 Days

On torture-3: What was actually done to detainees by the US

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

An article by Mark Danner in the April 30, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books accompanied his release of the February 2007 confidential report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on what was done to detainees in US custody. It is truly horrifying. These are the methods that were used by the US on its detainees:

  • Suffocation by water poured over a cloth placed over the nose and mouth…[i.e., ‘waterboarding’]
  • Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head…
  • Beatings by use of a collar held around the detainees’ neck and used to forcefully bang the head and body against the wall…
  • Beating and kicking, including slapping, punching, kicking to the body and face…
  • Confinement in a box to severely restrict movement…
  • Prolonged nudity…this enforced nudity lasted for periods ranging from several weeks to several months…
  • Sleep deprivation…through use of forced stress positions (standing or sitting), cold water and use of repetitive loud noises or music…
  • Exposure to cold temperature…especially via cold cells and interrogation rooms, and…use of cold water poured over the body or…held around the body by means of a plastic sheet to create an immersion bath with just the head out of water.
  • Prolonged shackling of hands and/or feet…
  • Threats of ill-treatment, to the detainee and/or his family…
  • Forced shaving of the head and beard…
  • Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food from 3 days to 1 month after arrest…

How did the US torturers even come up with the ideas for these methods? They were developed as part of the SERE (“Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape”) counter-resistance program developed by the US military, to train their own people to resist what they themselves called torture when it was done to them by others. Danner quotes a Senate Armed Services Committee report that says:

The techniques used in SERE school, based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, include stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navy’s SERE school, it included waterboarding.

The progression is chilling. When done by the Chinese against US prisoners, these actions were unequivocally condemned as torture. These torture techniques were then used to train US personnel to resist torture in the event they were captured by countries that did not abide by the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions or the Treaty Against Torture. And then they were used as a how-to manual by the US to torture others.

There is no doubt that the US has tortured people in violation of the law. The question now is what should be done about it.

As Danner says:

One fact, seemingly incontrovertible, after the descriptions contained and the judgments made in the ICRC report, is that officials of the United States, in interrogating prisoners in the “War on Terror,” have tortured and done so systematically. From many other sources, including the former president himself, we know that the decision to do so was taken at the highest level of the American government and carried out with the full knowledge and support of its most senior officials.

Once this is accepted as a fact, certain consequences might be expected to follow. First, that these policies, violating as they do domestic and international law, must be changed—which, as noted, President Obama began to accomplish on his first full day in office. Second, that they should be explicitly repudiated—a more complicated political process, which has, perhaps, begun, but only begun. Third, that those who ordered, designed, and applied them must be brought before the public in some societally sanctioned proceeding, made to explain what they did and how, and suffer some appropriate consequence.

And fourth, and crucially, that some judgment must be made, based on the most credible of information compiled and analyzed and weighed by the most credible of bodies, about what these policies actually accomplished: how they advanced the interests of the country, if indeed they did advance them, and how they hurt them.

But rather than following through on the logic that those who commit torture should face investigation and prosecution, what has been disgusting are the efforts to excuse and justify these actions in response to these revelations, simply because they were done by ‘our’ side.

Next: The parade of excuses for the torture committed by the US

POST SCRIPT: Hypocrisy

The Daily Show on the difference between the way Japanese torturers were treated compared to the US torturers for doing the same things.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
A Brief History of Torture
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On torture-2: When sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

In the previous post in this series, I invented a hypothetical example of two American journalists tortured by North Korea to argue that the reaction in the US is quite different when torture is done by other counties, in order to illustrate the hypocrisy of condemning those actions by others that we excuse in ourselves. It now turns out that this kind of scenario actually happened. Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, who is closely related to the ruling family of that country, was caught on videotape torturing people.

Particularly damaging was the apparent involvement of a policeman in the torture and the impunity with which Sheikh Issa could act, even after the tape emerged. He is a senior prince related to powerful members of the ruling family in Abu Dhabi.
…
Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan is now under investigation in the United Arab Emirates after the shocking tape showed him beating a man with a nailed plank, setting him on fire, attacking him with a cattle prod and running him over.
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The UAE at first said that the matter had been privately settled between Sheikh Issa and his victim. They also added that UAE police had followed all their rules and regulations properly.
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The fresh revelations about Issa’s actions will add further doubt to a pending nuclear energy deal between the UAE and the US. The deal, signed in the final days of George W Bush, is seen as vital for the UAE. It will see the US share nuclear energy expertise, fuel and technology in return for a promise to abide by non-proliferation agreements. But the deal needs to be recertified by the Obama administration and there is growing outrage in America over the tapes. Congressman James McGovern, a senior Democrat, has demanded that Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, investigate the matter and find out why US officials initially appeared to play down its significance. (my italics)

Unlike the CIA, which earlier this year revealed as a result of a lawsuit that it had destroyed 92 videotapes of its so-called “enhanced interrogations”, the prince was not savvy enough to do the same and it appears that there are over two hours of tape showing him torturing over 25 people. Now there are calls for investigations and prosecutions because of fears that otherwise his actions will create public relations problems in the US.

I don’t know why the UAE is worried. If there is any country that should understand and sympathize with the prince and seek to excuse his actions and need to torture, it is the US. Aren’t we the country that detains people indefinitely without trial, without access to lawyers, courts, and family, and subjects them to all manner of treatments that violate all norms of acceptable behavior and has led to death, permanent injury, and insanity?

As Glenn Greenwald, who has been one of the strongest voices for the investigation and prosecution of torture wherever it occurs says sarcastically:

But anyway, enough about all that divisive partisan unpleasantness — back to this brutal, criminal UAE prince: let’s watch more of those videotapes, express our outrage on behalf of international human rights standards, and threaten the UAE that their relationship with us will suffer severely unless there is a real investigation — not the whitewash they tried to get away with — along with real accountability. We simply cannot, in good conscience, maintain productive relations with a country that fails to take “torture” seriously. We are, after all, the United States.

A recent obituary in the New York Times of a US soldier who had been captured by the Chinese during the Korean war casually labels his treatment by the Chinese as torture. The obituary reads:

Col. Harold E. Fischer Jr., an American fighter pilot who was routinely tortured in a Chinese prison during and after the Korean War… From April 1953 through May 1955, Colonel Fischer — then an Air Force captain — was held at a prison outside Mukden, Manchuria. For most of that time, he was kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.

But when it comes to what the US has done to the prisoners it controls, the same paper gets all coy about using that harsh word and resorts to euphemisms. As Andrew Sullivan comments:

The NYT’s incoherence and double standards, equally, are self-evident. But I would like to know if [NYT editor] Bill Keller will remove the t-word from this obit and replace it with “harsh interrogations” as he does when referring to the US government’s use of identical techniques. If not, why not? Remember: these people won’t even use the word torture to describe a technique displayed in the Cambodian museum of torture to commemmorate [sic] the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge – as long as Americans do the torturing.

Some apologists for US torture try to trivialize it by characterizing what was done as little more than the kinds of hi-jinks done by fraternities. Glenn Greenwald applies that same logic to what was done to Fischer:

So that’s torture now? To use the prevailing American mindset: a room that doesn’t meet the standards of a Hilton and some whistling in the background is torture? My neighbor whistles all the time; does that mean he’s torturing me? It’s not as though Fischer had his eyes poked out by hot irons or was placed in a coffin-like box with bugs or was handcuffed to the ceiling.

The new Obama administration seems to have joined the chorus of people are anxious to put all this ‘nasty’ business of our own torture behind us, to ignore all the acts of torture that have been committed and to “look forward and not behind” so that we can then lecture other countries on the evils of torture.

The hypocrisy on this issue is so widespread and reaches all levels that people seem to be blinded by it, as this Tom Tomorrow cartoon indicates.

Next: What exactly did the US do to its detainees?

POST SCRIPT: Please don’t tell us about the bad stuff we do

The Daily Show says that what seems to really upset some people is not the fact that the US government tortures people but that the torture practices were revealed.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c
We Don’t Torture
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On torture-1: Torture is just flat-out wrong

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

Some of you might have heard of the case of two American journalists who are to stand trial in North Korea for having entered the country illegally on March 17, 2009. They are accused of committing acts that were hostile to that country.

It was revealed that the two had confessed to being spies for the US and had entered North Korea in order to gain information to aid a military attack on that country. The confessions came after the two journalists had been subjected to solitary confinement, waterboarded repeatedly, kept in sleep-deprived and stress positions for days on end, confined naked in a small box with insects allowed to crawl all over them, and repeatedly slammed against walls, a process known as ‘walling’.

When the US protested against this treatment of its citizens, arguing that such acts constituted torture and were a gross violation of international laws and treaties and that the confessions thus obtained were inadmissible as evidence, the North Korean government stated that President Kim Jong Il had personally authorized the actions and their Justice Department has said that all these methods had been deemed to be legal, especially in light of the imminent threat to the nation’s security because of the hostile attitude of the US towards North Korea.
[Read more…]

American oligarchy-7: What needs to be done

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

So where does Barack Obama fit into this picture? We saw him strike various populist themes during the campaign. But it should be clear from the people he has surrounded himself with on economic policy that he too is completely subservient to Wall Street interests. In fact, populist and supposedly liberal Democratic politicians like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are far more useful to Wall Street in many ways, because they hide their subservience to Wall Street better. Liberal watchdogs tend to let down their guard and thus allow these politicians to give away the store in ways that Republicans, with their naked greed, would find hard to get away with.
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American oligarchy-6: The victories of the oligarchy

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)
In his article in the May 2009 issue of The Atlantic magazine titled The Quiet Coup, Former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson lists the fruits of the collusion between both political parties and Wall Street interests.

From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:

  • insistence on free movement of capital across borders;
  • the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;
  • a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;
  • major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;
  • a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;
  • an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;
  • and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.

Just examine that list for a moment. Did you hear about any of those important actions while they were being carried out? Were there front page news reports and commentary on them? Loud arguments? Highly publicized congressional hearings? Fierce partisan debates? When all that was going on, was there any attempt at informing the public of the potential consequences of these wide-ranging decisions? Of course not. The chances are that during those times our attention was focused on Monica Lewinsky, Terri Schiavo, gay marriage, Chandra Levy, Valerie Plame, and the like. This is why observing politics has to be like watching a magician. If you look at what your attention is being drawn to, you are missing what is actually happening. The real action takes place in obscure committee hearings, at the regulatory bodies, in private meetings between members of government and the heads of the financial firms, over lunch and dinner and on golf courses.

Did you notice how in the fall of 2008, as we lurched daily from crisis to crisis as one big firm after another like Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers fell, we were presented by the Treasury and Federal Reserve officials with ‘solutions’ to the problems that had been worked out seemingly overnight involving the taxpayer-subsidized purchase of one major institution by another that involved hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars? The only way that consensus could be reached so quickly and smoothly on such major actions was if there had always been collusion between the government and the financial firms involved and they saw their interests as one and the same.

Simon Johnson continues:

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand.
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This latest plan—which is likely to provide cheap loans to hedge funds and others so that they can buy distressed bank assets at relatively high prices—has been heavily influenced by the financial sector, and Treasury has made no secret of that.

Johnson says that the same remedies that the IMF routinely gives to developing countries in similar financial crisis should also apply to the US. But they are not, because the American oligarchy is immune to the pressure that the IMF can put on oligarchies in other countries. The American oligarchy is not responsible to anyone.

As the IMF understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct way to do this is nationalization… Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process.
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This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient.

Then Johnson gets to the crux of the problem and what must be done. When reading it, remember that Johnson is a centrist technocrat, not some ideologue, and his understanding comes from dealing with many countries that have gone through financial crises.

The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy. (my italics)

But the IMF is not going to give this advice to the US because the US oligarchy, through the US government, pretty much dictates IMF policies.

The only way that the oligarchy will be broken is if the public demands it.

Next: Barack Obama’s role

POST SCRIPT: God as CEO

When you look at god’s actions as revealed in the Bible, you realize that he is not very good at strategic long-range planning, preferring to go for cheap and popular gimmicks. But not to worry! His apologists know how to explain away all the absurdities and contradictions.

(Thanks to Machines Like Us.)

American oligarchy-5: How Wall Street builds its power

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

In the previous posts, we saw how people with connections to big Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs are everywhere in government, especially in key economic policy-making positions, so that whichever party wins, their interests are protected and advanced.

In his article in the May 2009 issue of The Atlantic magazine titled The Quiet Coup, Simon Johnson explains how firms like Goldman Sachs have carefully cultivated their power structure.

[T]he American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson’s predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street’s worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

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American oligarchy-4: How oligarchies work

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Simon Johnson is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He used to be the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and in that role had to deal with many countries in financial crisis and had plenty of experience with oligarchies. He is hardly an ideologue. In fact, he calls himself a ‘centrist technocrat’, which is the kind of person that these international financial institutions usually have in their technical divisions. But yet he has no hesitation in identifying the current financial crisis in the US as caused by the same kind of oligarchies that he encountered in his dealings with developing countries in crisis. In a must-read article titled The Quiet Coup that appeared in the May 2009 issue of The Atlantic magazine, he describes how oligarchies work and how they end up ruining the economies of countries.
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American oligarchy-2: The fraud on the American people

(For previous posts in this series, see here.)

Obama’s nominee to be chief performance officer, Nancy Killefer, had to withdraw her nomination following the revelation that she had a mere $946.69 lien on her property in 2005 for failure to pay taxes ($298 in unemployment compensation for household help, $48.69 in interest, and $600.00 in penalties.) This was a fairly trivial issue.

Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle had to also withdraw over the failure to pay a much larger amount of $140,000 in taxes but there was a faintly plausible case of ambiguity there. I was glad Daschle withdrew for a different reason, because he is completely enmeshed with all kinds of lobbying interests.
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